Backups that had never been restored, turned into a recovery time you can quote to the board
Backup cluster + off-site DR programme
Where they started
Backups ran nightly and reported success. No restore had been attempted in three years, and the disaster recovery plan was a document last edited by someone who had left.
The problem, precisely
The business had an RTO and RPO in a policy document that had never been connected to anything technically measured.
What we did
Tiered the estate by recovery requirement first, then built backup and replication to those tiers and proved each one by restoring it.
Delivered
- Every system assigned to one of four recovery tiers with a defined RTO and RPO
- Backup jobs rebuilt against those tiers, replacing a single nightly schedule
- Off-site immutable repository with retention, protected from a compromised primary
- First full restore drill: fourteen critical systems recovered and timed, with a report
- Quarterly drill cycle with rotating scopes, so every tier is exercised each year
Technologies used
Measured result
Every number below was measured and reported to the customer. Where we do not have a measured figure, the entry is a fact rather than a percentage — we would rather be precise than impressive.
- 0 → 14 systems with a measured and tested restore
- — measured RTO per tier, replacing a policy number
- 1 quarterly drill cycle, calendared and reported
- 4 recovery tiers, each with its own evidence
A recovery tier nobody has restored is a hypothesis. Write the tier on the whiteboard, then prove it with a timer and a report.